The Rise and Fall of a Gangsta Coach
NORMAN, GEOFFREY
The Rise and Fall of a Gangsta Coach Jimmy Johnson debased football, college and professional. BY GEOFFREY NORMAN JIMMY JOHNSON RESIGNED as head coach of the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, January...
...It has been a long time since anyone believed in the business about football building character...
...After one more year, Johnson left Miami and the college game, with its fussy, if indifferently enforced, standards and went to the pros...
...The tears and honorifics seemed out of place, at first...
...The Dallas Cowboys won back-to -back super Bowls while he was head Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is the author of Alabama Showdown: The Football Rivalry Between Auburn and Alabama...
...Coaches, especially, understand that their obligation is to win games, and they do whatever it takes and hope they don't get caught...
...The Hurricanes liked to think of themselves as "outlaws," and they once showed up for a bowl game, with the national championship at stake, dressed in combat fatigues to symbolize, one supposes, the fact that they were "on a mission...
...They were unable to share the glory...
...Johnson did television for a couple of years until the call came from Miami...
...If a player can help him win, a coach is willing to overlook a few character flaws...
...two with the pros...
...Promised to develop a running game to complement the passing of quarterback Dan Marino, the team's aging star...
...Jimmy Johnson looked around and realized that the other guys were signing actual killers...
...This was never true in the pros, and if it ever was in the college game, steven spielberg could make a soft focus movie about those times, with Tom Hanks playing a coach...
...The Dallas Cowboys were not required to attend classes or graduate...
...As the mists of sentimentality surrounding his departure dry up, and Johnson's career is viewed clearly, he will be properly remembered as football's first gangsta coach...
...But the rot went deeper than the tasteless clothes off the field or taunting and strutting on it...
...Johnson seemed to feel he could get players like Phillips to perform for him and what they did with their free time was their own business...
...In truth, Johnson had been at Miami all of four years...
...Players routinely get into trouble with the law for a variety of offenses, including knocking their girlfriends around...
...But it quickly became evident that Johnson preferred the same kind of players in the pros that had worked for him in college...
...The game had passed him by...
...The others he held for five years each...
...However, the year after the combat fatigue incident, the team had another chance to win the national championship and, this time, delivered...
...The gangsta act has become an accepted part of football, less controversial than instant replay...
...coach there...
...The football program was considered by many to be out of control...
...In last year's college draft, he took a player named Cecil Collins who had been convicted of twice breaking into women's rooms and fondling them...
...The Johnson legacy (a word that seems to get a lot of play these days) will not, however, focus on his root-lessness or his ability to win championships...
...Now i want to spend time with my family...
...Johnson won a Super Bowl in his fourth year at Dallas...
...Still, Johnson didn't give up...
...So in the end, maybe this was another take on the old melancholy tale...
...And why not...
...This time, he told reporters, "it is final and forever...
...They lost the game...
...But it didn't work with Phillips, who got in trouble with the law and was, eventually, cut...
...This was his fourth head coaching job...
...The surprise was not that he left—he had a history of doing that—but the mood of his departure...
...Inevitably, he brought in his kind of players...
...The Dolphins still had no ground game and Marino's arm was dead...
...Two of those positions were in the college ranks...
...These included Lawrence Phillips, a running back best known for dragging his girlfriend down a flight of stairs while he was a player at the University of Nebraska...
...Johnson's fall was treated almost elegiacally by the networks, some of which carried the press conference live, including Johnson's swallowed sobs and emotional hugs with the team owner...
...Collins was a fair runner but by the end of the season he was in jail...
...BY GEOFFREY NORMAN JIMMY JOHNSON RESIGNED as head coach of the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, January 16, the day after the Jacksonville Jaguars beat his team like a rented mule, as they say in football circles...
...They were pros...
...But, on reflection, perhaps not...
...What made Johnson different, made him a pioneer when he was rolling up a big record with the Miami Hurricanes in the '80s, was that he put together a team of many thugs and some felons and made no apologies...
...He avidly recruited the hard cases...
...He promised the city, and his new owner, a Super Bowl...
...Last year, the Denver Broncos painted a 38-3 whipping on them, and Johnson resigned after that game, too...
...They were paid above the table, and handsomely, to win...
...But he changed his mind within 24 hours or so...
...Johnson, like other coaching legends, left his mark...
...And you almost expected someone to start reading from Housman or Yeats...
...After his second Super Bowl, he left the team in a dispute with the owner, Jerry Jones...
...The final score was 62-7 and it wasn't that close...
...I've had my time in the sun," Johnson said, "my time in the spotlight...
...He was no longer an innovator...
...Phillips was suspended for a few games and given the usual classes in "anger management," which, typically, he seems to have flunked...
...The team was humiliated in the playoffs and Johnson made his emotional exit...
...This season, a member of the Carolina Panthers did manage to raise eyebrows by (allegedly) killing his pregnant girlfriend...
...It had worked before...
...But his players were frequently in trouble with the law and often suspended for violations of the league's drug policies...
...Because of him, the game will never be the same...
...You would have thought, if you knew no history, that this was a case of a man stepping down after long, arduous, and honorable service...
...After he was cut by the pro team that drafted him—good runner but too hard to handle—he made his way with almost biblical inevitability to Miami...
...This was the second consecutive year in which the Dolphins were humiliated in the playoffs...
...Fans expect taunting and strutting and trash-talking...
...Several of Johnson's players had serious run-ins with the law and were involved in various scandals...
...One of Johnson's college teams, the University of Miami, won a national championship...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 19
